WAYNE MILLER: I sold a silver dollar about three years ago for $525,000.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: The Book of Matthew says it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. Wayne Miller takes that scripture seriously.

WAYNE MILLER: I have a concern for these people when they go up, and I believe in a heaven and a non-heaven, when they go up there how are they going to explain, you know, what they’ve done with their money?

SEVERSON: Miller knows about money. He’s made enough of it. His little coin shop in downtown Helena, Montana has done more than $325 million in business since it opened 45 years ago. This is his son, Dave.

DAVE MILLER: Seriously, when they get any money their first thought is who can we bless? Who can we give this money to? I say that out of every $1,000 my dad gives $999 of it away without even thinking.

SEVERSON: Over the years, Miller has given away millions of dollars to charities all over the world, especially to the people of Helena. He knows that some have taken advantage of his and his wife’s generosity but says they would rather err on the side of love.

WAYNE MILLER: God doesn’t ask you about your ability or your inability. He asks you about your availability, and we happened to be available at a time when people were wanting to start a shelter.

SEVERSON:They called it God’s Love, and as homeless shelters go this one stands apart.

ANN MILLER: Unconditional love—you know, everybody talks about that, but what that means to us is that before they ever walk in the door the first time, we already love them. We don’t wait to see who they are or how they act or what their problem is or if they’re lazy. We already love them.

SEVERSON: Joe Wojton, one of God’s Love managers, has worked in other shelters around the country.

JOE WOJTON: Everybody who comes through our door are people with problems, not problem people, and we treat everybody with love when they come through our door because we realize the people we’re seeing—some have never been homeless before. This is a very scary experience, and we try to love them up the best we can.

SEVERSON: The shelter usually accommodates about 40 homeless downstairs and has rooms for nine families upstairs. But most of the people they feed here are not homeless. They have jobs and live in the community.

DAVE MILLER: People rely on us in the middle of the month to eat down here. They know the food stamps and the food boxes are only going to make it a couple of weeks, so they rely on us to come down, on their ability to come down and eat.

ANN MILLER: It doesn’t take a lot of misfortune to be on the street these days. I think everybody in America knows that right now.

SEVERSON: Dave Miller runs God’s Love and gives 10 percent of his salary back to the shelter.

DAVE MILLER: Yeah, we’ve seen a big change. Every day we have families that come in and say, “My husband had a great job making a lot of money. He got laid off. We can’t make next month’s rent.” Unfortunately, it used to be just couples. Now we’re seeing them with children.

SEVERSON: People like John and Krista Loweman, who is pregnant. Both were employed in South Carolina until they lost their jobs and came west looking for work and landed here.

(speaking to John Loweman): So you came here looking for work?

JOHN LOWEMAN: Yes, looking for work, anything, just a better life for me,my wife and my baby.

SEVERSON: But there was no jobs?

JOHN LOWEMAN: No, sir.

KRISTA LOWEMAN: Nothing, not even for me, and I’ve been to school.

ANN MILLER: We tell them that they can have three days no questions asked, just rest, eat, do their laundry, but after that they have to have a plan, and their plan usually is to find a job. But they can’t find a job.

SEVERSON: But if they can’t find a job, it doesn’t mean they have to leave, as long as they keep looking.

JOHN LOWEMAN: You have to put in five applications a day at least, and I do that every day but, you know, it’s kind of hard.

KRISTA LOWEMAN: It’s better than living in a car, though.

SEVERSON: Better than living in a car. You lived in a car for how long?

KRISTA LOWEMAN: Six weeks.

SEVERSON: Darcy Pfeiffer and her husband and baby boy live here. He works but can’t afford the rent. Brenda Rutecki’s husband died a year ago. She had no income, couldn’t get a job, came here while she attended school to become a certified nursing assistant.

BRENDA RUTECKI: You can’t get a job if you don’t have a phone. You can’t get a job if you don’t have a car. You can’t get a job if you don’t even have an address. So this is like our holding spot. We’re all good families. We’re all good people, but you’ve got to have a start, and that’s what they give us.

SEVERSON: One of the first things the Millers did was create a park next door to God’s Love just for the homeless. Having a homeless shelter and a park near the center of town was not exactly pleasing to local businessmen. But Toby DeWolf, owner of Bert and Ernies, says any opposition has faded away.

TOBY DEWOLF: I’ve been here 25 years, and I have never seen a better run shelter. I don’t think there’s a problem. I don’t think that anybody has seen an issue with any kind of violence or crime or anything by any means with having a shelter down here.

SEVERSON: The Millers both graduated from Catholic University in Washington, DC with master’s degrees. They have nine children, four of them adopted, and all of them, according to their father, are involved in one charity or another. There was a time when Wayne Miller, who is an expert on silver dollars, was measuring his life by the increasing value of his personal coin collection.

WAYNE MILLER: You know, I open up these catalogs, and they’ve got coins there, $30,000 or $40,000, $50,000 coins that I would dearly love to have, and I look at them and I say okay, I chose my path. If I did that I would be obsessed with that, and again, my whole measurement would be how advanced is your coin collection? And I didn’t want that to be.

SEVERSON: It doesn’t mean the Millers live in poverty. They travel, eat in the best restaurants, live in a very nice home with a swimming pool, but customers often wonder how successful a man can be if he rarely wears shoes.

WAYNE MILLER: People say can’t you afford to wear shoes, and I say I can afford not to have to wear shoes.

SEVERSON: He provides the bulk of the funding for God’s Love, millions of dollars over the years, but the shelter also receives a federal grant, money from the United Way and from other private donors.

WOJTON: It’s amazing when I go out to a church or to the local college, and I speak, and I hear from people, and they say, “Oh, we just thought the Millers pay for everything,” and that’s not the case. Wayne and Ann are wonderful, and Wayne donates a lot of money to God’s Love, but we need the entire community effort to keep God’s Love up and operating every year.

ANN MILLER: And I think over the years we’ve learned to love God more and more, and he’s always been there for us. When we were thinking that maybe we weren’t going to have enough money or whatever, he’s always supplied it. It’s been wonderful—abundance, just like the Bible says.

SEVERSON: The Millers are also helping in various ways about 150 Helena families who don’t live in the shelter. Altogether, he gives away about one-third of his gross income and is firmly convinced that it’s what God wanted him to do.

WAYNE MILLER: I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like. I’m fascinated to learn what it’s going to be like, but I am as certain as I can be that there is an afterlife and that I’m really going to have fun.

“It doesn’t take a lot of misfortune to be on the street these days. I think everybody in America knows that right now,” says Ann Miller of Helena, Montana, where she and her husband, Wayne, opened God’s Love, an emergency homeless shelter and soup kitchen./wnet/religionandethics/files/2011/06/thumb02-godsloveshelter.jpg

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2012/03/09/july-1-2011-gods-love-homeless-shelter/9075/feed/14altruism,Charity,economic recession,God's Love,homeless,Montana,poverty,shelter,wealth“It doesn’t take a lot of misfortune to be on the streets these days. I think everybody in America knows that right now,” says Ann Miller of Helena, Montana, where she and her husband, Wayne, opened God’s Love,“It doesn’t take a lot of misfortune to be on the streets these days. I think everybody in America knows that right now,” says Ann Miller of Helena, Montana, where she and her husband, Wayne, opened God’s Love, an emergency homeless shelter and soup kitchen.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno7:27 Organ Donationhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/06/03/august-20-2010-organ-donation/6830/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/06/03/august-20-2010-organ-donation/6830/#commentsFri, 03 Jun 2011 14:48:02 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=6830More →

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s early morning at Washington Hospital Center and time for a quick prayer before Flavia Walton heads into surgery. For eight years, Flavia’s husband, Bill, has had severe kidney disease, and Flavia is donating a kidney. But her kidney isn’t going to Bill. They weren’t compatible enough—at least when it came to kidneys. So Bill had to be put on the transplant list.

BILL WALTON: You are placed on the list, and then the wait begins, and it goes on and on and on, and your only hope is you can check the list on the Internet and see if the numbers are getting any smaller. But they never do.

LAWTON: Then Bill and Flavia heard about a program known as a paired kidney exchange, where Flavia could donate her kidney to somebody else, and in exchange Bill would get a kidney from another donor who was a perfect match.

BILL WALTON: Bottom line here is you’ve got to give one to get one.

LAWTON: The Waltons were part of the world’s largest kidney swap to date, sponsored by Washington Hospital Center and Georgetown University Hospital. It involved a complex chain of 28 surgeries at four different hospitals. Most of the donors gave a kidney in order to benefit a friend or family member. But a couple of donors did it out of a sense of altruism, with no particular recipient in mind. In the end 14 patients who had been particularly hard to match received kidney transplants. The donors and recipients were introduced to each other at an emotional news conference.

RALPH WOLFE (kidney donor speaking at press conference): I love this guy. I don’t even know him, but I love him.

GARY JOHNSON (kidney recipient speaking at press conference): You can’t imagine how fortunate I feel that somebody from somewhere in the universe came and gave me a kidney.

FLAVIA WALTON (speaking at press conference): To see someone that you love most in the world deteriorate is a sense of helplessness and powerlessness that you just cannot comprehend unless you’ve been there. But to be able to do something is so empowering, but it is such a blessing.

LAWTON: More than 100,000 Americans are currently on the waiting list for an organ transplant, the vast majority of them waiting for a kidney. Over the last decade, an estimated 60,000 people died while still waiting for a transplant. Given those numbers, many experts say there is a moral obligation to encourage more people to become organ donors.

PROFESSOR ROBERT VEATCH (Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University): Just a little nudge would do enormous amounts of good in terms of saving lives and making sick people’s lives better.

LAWTON: The incentive for Flavia Walton to become an organ donor was clearly to benefit her husband of 42 years.

FLAVIA WALTON: If God could give his son for me, or for us, I could certainly give a kidney to keep someone else alive. And I certainly want to keep him around as long as possible. I don’t know if he wants to keep me around that much longer.

BILL WALTON: No, I got no complaints.

FLAVIA: Okay, okay. But no, it was not a hard decision at all.

LAWTON: Living donors are screened psychologically to ensure they are not being unduly pressured into the surgery. It is major surgery, but because of medical advances the risks to the donors are quite low. Because of these factors, Professor Veatch at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics says there are few ethical problems with kidney swaps such as the one the Waltons were part of.

VEATCH: If we can get a living donor we get a better kidney, a more viable kidney, and it shows up in the survival-rate statistics.

LAWTON: His main ethical concern with the swaps is making sure that kidney patients without a loved one willing to donate are not pushed lower on the waiting list, particularly those with hard-to-match blood types.

VEATCH: We at least want to be fair with the people on the wait list who don’t have a family member available. Being fair might mean waiting a trivial extra amount of time, but we certainly don’t want to make those people wait years extra just because of the swap arrangements.

LAWTON: While the swap program has been successful, some other strategies to encourage organ donation have run into roadblocks because of the National Organ Transplant Act, which forbids any monetary compensation for organ donation. Twenty-five years ago, Veatch testified in support of that law, but he’s now urging that it be revisited. He’s calling for experimentation with some token financial incentives. For example, he would support a modest discount on driver’s license renewals for people who sign up to be organ donors. Or, he says, there could be a question on income tax returns asking people to be donors, and even offering a tax deduction for those who say yes.

VEATCH: It sort of taints the altruism of organ donation. On the other hand, real human lives are at stake here, and I would be willing to compromise the altruism at the margins if we can really save some lives.

LAWTON: Veatch also says the religious community should do more to promote organ donation.

VEATCH: It’s considered an altruistic, charitable act, and all the major religions look favorably upon that behavior.

LAWTON: Veatch tries to counter one theological concern he hears among some conservative Christians, especially in the black church, who believe individuals will be bodily resurrected in the end times, and therefore they worry about the implications of organ donation.

VEATCH: The doctrine is when you are resurrected you will be resurrected to look like you, but with all the bad stuff fixed. So if you had cancer, the cancer won’t be there, and if organs had been procured, or consumed by fire, you will get a new version of the body.

LAWTON: Flavia Walton, who is a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, says she tries to address that theological issue in her community as well.

FLAVIA WALTON: I think that there’s some notion or some belief among many that feel that when we meet our maker, we have to meet our maker all in one piece. For me, it means I just want to meet the maker. I don’t think the maker cares whether I’m all in one piece or not. I don’t think that’s the issue.

LAWTON: The Waltons say organ donation is of particular concern to African Americans because more than 60 percent of patients who need transplants are non-white. At the same time, African Americans have a disproportionately low rate of organ donation. The Waltons hope their story can help change that.

BILL WALTON: Exposure is key, and the more we can expose to that population that it works and we’re examples of that, the more emphasis we can get out there that spread the word and let’s proceed.

LAWTON: After two years on dialysis, Bill says he can’t believe how great he feels now. He says the gift of someone else’s kidney has meant everything to him.

BILL WALTON: Life, basically. You can’t get any more basic than that—life with a little ginger thrown in, because it’s a life that is much more comfortable than what I had.

LAWTON: Flavia says donating a kidney turned out to be a spiritual experience for her, definitely worth the short time she spent recovering from surgery.

FLAVIA WALTON: Just feeling good that I’ve been able to do something and that hopefully I’ll be able to make a difference not only in the life of the recipient of my kidney, but hopefully it’ll spread, and hopefully I’ll be able to make a difference in helping other people make a decision to make a difference in the lives of others.

LAWTON: And as politicians and ethicists wrestle over how to encourage more organ donations, the Waltons hope stories like theirs will be the best incentive of all.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

Donating organs “is considered an altruistic, charitable act, and all the major religions look favorably upon that behavior,” says ethicist Robert Veatch./wnet/religionandethics/files/2010/08/thumb01-organdonation.jpg

]]>“We can open up the question of financial incentives” for organ donations “without worrying about undue coercive pressures,” says Robert Veatch, professor of medical ethics and former director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University.

/wnet/religionandethics/files/2010/08/thumb01-veatch.jpg“We can open up the question of financial incentives” for organ donations “without worrying about undue coercive pressures,” says medical ethicist Robert Veatch of Georgetown University.

]]>Read an excerpt from TAMING THE BELOVED BEAST: HOW MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY COSTS ARE DESTROYING OUR HEALTH CARE SYSTEM by Daniel Callahan (Princeton University Press, 2009):

The aim of health care should be, within a finite life span, to help us to have a good chance to progress from being young to being old—but not to go from being old to being indefinitely older; to relieve us of our most burdensome physical and mental suffering—but not always fully or perfectly; to rehabilitate us as best it can if we are disabled—but to understand that some of us will live our lives with chronic illnesses and disabilities; and to help us achieve as pain-free and peaceful death as is possible—but knowing that goal will not always be possible. Medicine ought not to seek an indefinite extension of life or aim to enhance our nature beyond the ordinary standards of good health, or search out medical ways of excessively fighting our decline and frailties, many of which are now and always will be unavoidable. Just as death ought not to be taken as the ultimate enemy of human life, health should not be taken as the ultimate good.

*

Daniel Callahan

As Judith Feder and Donald W. Moran have observed, “To be serious about cost containment, it will be necessary to admit that containing costs will require affecting the decisions that individual Americans make every day in all the settings in which they make them.” Whether Americans can be brought to think differently about health, to expect less and to settle for less, and to be willing to forgo some health care they might like, or even need, for the sake of the public good, takes a utopian, or maybe a counter-utopian elixir of hope and imagination. I see no plausible alternative.

As individuals, we are in a position similar to our health care system problem if we do not learn to rein in our aspirations for perfect health, to live with some of our needs that might otherwise be medically dealt with, to run some risks with our health, understand that an elevated level of this or that reflects a possibility of harm only, not a death sentence, and to recognize (even if begrudgingly) that a cure of one of our otherwise lethal diseases will not save us from some other one. Cured diseases are always succeeded by a final and fatal disease. If we as individuals do not bring some greater realism to our health, some willingness to put up with our mortality and vulnerability, and the anxiety that goes with its recognition, then there is no hope that costs can be controlled, hardly any technologies that can be limited or denied.

There is, to be sure, an obvious objection to my line of thought here. Even if, as individuals, we limit our medical appetite, there is no guarantee that any money saved by our altruism will go to other more serious social or health needs. True enough, and that is one of the serious penalties for living in a society without universal health care and the circumscribed budget that should go with it. But it is also true, as we can see with voting, that it is a bad mistake to think that, with a large electorate, our individual votes are irrelevant. The danger is not that one vote will harm the election process. It is that, if everyone thinks that way, then the process will indeed be harmed. So, if only a few of us begin to change our views of health care, and then a few more, that might indeed make a difference.

My scenario may be fanciful, but as individuals we need an open discussion on what counts as good or bad choices, wise or imprudent ones, and our social obligations to our community as we make them. Such a discussion need not be, and ought not be, coercive. It might, however, help shape some rough consensus, moving us at least in the right direction There is an obvious truism, usually ignored in health care, that the collective, aggregate impact of our private choices can affect the public good. Hence, it is worth the effort to see if those private choices can be nudged in a helpful direction. That direction would be, following my finite model of health care, toward less, not more, and even much less.

/wnet/religionandethics/files/2009/11/thumbnail3.jpgRead an excerpt from a new book on medical technology costs and health care by Daniel Callahan, who advocates “an open discussion on what counts as good or bad choices, wise or imprudent ones, and our social obligations to our community as we make them.”

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now a story about a man who once lived the glamorous life of a movie executive but gave it up to help the poorest of the poor — little children in Cambodia. His name is Scott Neeson.

SCOTT NEESON: He basically found his own way down to the dump where he was living on his own. You can see he’s got a lot of scars on his arm. But he was a professional garbage picker surviving on his own — picking up the rubbish, living day to day.

LUCKY SEVERSON: Like the scar right here?

Mr. NEESON: Like the scar right here, yeah.

SEVERSON: What would that be from?

Mr. NEESON: It would be a burn.

SEVERSON: Scott Neeson found most of his kids at this mountain of garbage outside Cambodia’s capital city of Phnom Penh. Pictures alone don’t do it justice — don’t reveal the stench, the filth, maggots, the chemical waste, and sharp, jagged objects.

Mr. NEESON: When I first came here, I had nightmares. I had terrible dreams for a week or two afterwards. And I think some of the things I’ve seen out here are just horrendous.

SEVERSON: This is home and the workplace to hundreds of little kids and over a thousand families.

Mr. NEESON: They live day by day. They go and they pick up the rubbish. They get enough for food and do it all again the next day.

SEVERSON: Neeson first came to Cambodia in 2003 on a backpacking trip. He couldn’t get over all the homeless kids, begging for a handout. Neeson gave them money and paid for schooling, but within a week many parents had spent the money and pulled their kids out of school so they could work.

Mr. NEESON: And in the water here you’ll see them washing and doing their laundry.

SEVERSON: Neeson says he found himself moved by the horrific circumstances of the young kids. It was an extremely different world for him. He had just left his position as president of 20th Century Fox International and accepted a top job at Sony Pictures.

Mr. NEESON: You know, it was a really glamorous life. You know, I had the Porsche. Yeah, a five-bedroom home that was worth a few million dollars. I had the Porsche and a big old boat.

SEVERSON: You were a man of means?

Mr. NEESON: I was a man of means and luxuries. And yet — I sort of enjoyed it, but I wasn’t particularly happy.

SEVERSON: Neeson decided he would honor his commitment to Sony Pictures but returned often to Phnom Penh, where he started the Cambodian Children’s Fund. For many kids, it’s a live-in school where they attend classes by day and learn about their culture by night. Some spend their nights at home. Ally Hoffman came here on a visit and returned to be Neeson’s assistant after she graduated from the University of Southern California.

ALLY HOFFMAN: There’s room and there’s a bed and, you know, soup in the pot, and that just changes their life, in minutes sometimes. I tell Scott that I can tell who’s been here longer because it’s almost like watching something flower.

SEVERSON: Scott made the decision to move here permanently after he received an emergency call from his staff in Los Angeles.

Mr. NEESON: And my phone rang, and it was my office, and the actor who was on tour was having quite a serious meltdown because the private jet didn’t have the right amenities for him. And he wasn’t — he didn’t want to get on the jet. The whole tour was in jeopardy. And the quote that their life wasn’t meant to be this difficult is what they said to me on the phone. And I thought, I don’t want this to be my world. This isn’t my reality anymore.

Oh God, this is one of the heartbreak ones. She spent two months at the school, and then her mother took her back because she was losing income.

SEVERSON: On this particular day at the dump, he was relieved and elated to find a 12-year-old girl named Tola who had attended his school.

Mr. NEESON (To Tola): You’ve got the best smile in this area.

SEVERSON: After a few months, Tola’s mother wouldn’t let her attend school anymore — said she needed her to collect scrap metal so she could put food on the table.

Mr. NEESON: I went seven times; I was at her house, banging on the door, because Tola didn’t show up.

SEVERSON: He found her mother at the dump and began intense negotiating to get Tola back in school. Finally, they reached a deal that the parents would allow Tola to attend school for at least a few months.

Channoeurnh Sok helps at the school and says Neeson would never turn any child away if he could avoid it.

CHANNOEURNH SOK: Scott really wants to help all the children that he sees. Yes, and he hoped to have all of them. He said he will save the world if he can.

SEVERSON: So far, the bulk of the money he has spent has been his own, but eventually that will run out. He’s been getting some help from his old buddies back in Hollywood.

Mr. GIANOPULOS: The notion that you can give up this life and the cars and the houses and the glamour and all the trappings of success — particularly in this industry — to just give it all up and do something really meaningful to people that really need it is, I think, something that all of us feel that we, hopefully, feel that we have the nobility and capability of doing. But few of us actually do it. In fact, I don’t know anybody that’s doing what Scott’s done.

Mr. NEESON: It was always eating away at me. At some level I was always just a little bit discontented. I could never quite put my finger on it, but it never seemed like it was me. I’d no idea this would be the other extreme.

SEVERSON: Neeson says he doesn’t belong to an organized religion but leans toward Buddhism, in part because it accepts suffering as part of life and has helped the kids endure their own suffering.

Mr. NEESON: And the one thing it’s really taught me, even more than, I think, spirituality, is the resilience of the human spirit. What these kids have been through is remarkable, and they come here, and they have a sense of real happiness.

SEVERSON: Neeson says when he finally marries he’ll be much better prepared for fatherhood. As it is, he knows the life story of each of his 118 kids.

Mr. NEESON: He’s a wonderful boy but he’s had a terrible couple of years. He’s lost his entire family — his brothers, sisters, and mother and father — all in the last two years.

Saih Nik here was a garbage picker even though she’s tiny. She was four when we found her. She just turned five last month.

SEVERSON: Marie Cammal has been working with homeless children most of her life. She says what Neeson is doing will make a difference.

MARIE CAMMAL: Because when you change the life of one child of Cambodia, in Cambodia, that means you save at least two or three generations ahead. You give education to one boy or one girl — that means this boy and this girl will have a better job and will feed 15 people in their family, within their family. Yes, but we need a lot of guys like him.

SEVERSON: He keeps in close touch with parents of the kids at school. This family smiles and welcomes him to their humble home, complete with squealing pigs and swarming flies.

Much to the delight of Neeson and everyone else, including Tola, her nervous father gives his permission, his thumbprint pledging not to pull Tola out of school for at least a few months.

Mr. GIANOPULOS: You know, we all want to change the world, and when we approach that effort and try and implement that desire, you know, you realize it is very difficult to change the world. But what Scott has done has changed a little piece of it and completely changed it for these kids.

SEVERSON: His friends keep asking him when he’s moving back home. He says for the foreseeable future, that’s not an option.

Mr. NEESON: There’s no going back. I mean, what would happen here with 117, 118 children who are going through the process of changing their lives? They’re trying their best. I mean, how do you just walk away from that? Do you put them back in the streets? Do you just forget about it? I didn’t realize the permanency of what I’d started here until relatively recently.

SEVERSON: Even though the school has all the kids it can handle right now, Neeson still keeps a close eye for kids at the dump who are especially vulnerable. Meanwhile, he’s looking for the ways and means to care for more kids.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, the phenomenon known as altruism — generosity to others with no expectation of getting anything back. For many, giving is a religious requirement: the Christian Golden Rule — unselfish love; for Jews, the 613 “mitzvot” — good deeds to be done; for Muslims, it’s “zakat” — distributing some of your income to the poor and treating others as you would like to be treated. Others just do good whether they are religious or not. We have a Lucky Severson story today about people who are altruistic.

LUCKY SEVERSON: This is Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland. The guest lecturer is Harold Mintz. He’s here to talk about a subject that is easy to define but not always easy to explain — why we sometimes do good things without expecting good things in return. It’s called altruism.

HAROLD MINTZ (Lecturing to Students at Walt Whitman High School): Five years ago last month, I gave my kidney to somebody. That in itself is not that unusual. That actually happens all the time, which is a good thing. What makes this story a little bit more unusual is that I gave my kidney to someone I didn’t know.

SEVERSON: His wife, Susan:

SUSAN MINTZ (Wife of Harold Mintz): Well, we decided we would take it a step at time. And when he said he’d have to, you know, go through a battery of tests, I went, “Okay, we are in. There’s no way he’s going to pass the psychological test.”

SEVERSON: University of California political science professor Kristen Renwick Monroe started out as a political economist, but she discovered that altruism undermines the assumption that people only act out of self-interest.

Dr. KRISTEN RENWICK MONROE (Professor, Political Science, University of California, Irvine): One of the problems I have with a lot of the research in this area, particularly because there are policy consequences, is that they enshrine a kind of sanctity to self-interest. And then they say this is, you know — greed is good; this is what we should be doing; it makes the world go ’round. And altruism is interesting because it doesn’t fit that pattern.

SEVERSON: Professor Monroe has researched acts of kindness and compassion and written two books on altruism. She believes people act altruistically because of how they view themselves, how they value others, and their religious teachings. Doing good for others is a core principle of all the world’s major religions — Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. Loving your neighbor as yourself is an act of altruism. Harold Mintz says he doesn’t think religion was the reason he donated his kidney. He thinks it had to do with how helpless he felt when his dad died.

Mr. MINTZ (Lecturing to Students at Walt Whitman High School): Fifteen years ago, I came home from school one day, and my dad said to me over the dinner table, “I went to the doctor today. He says I’m sick.” He had cancer. From the day he came home and told us he was sick to the day he passed was five weeks. I guess the whole frustration of having nothing that I could do to help save my father, and yet there’s so many people that are dying when you know exactly what to do to save them.

SEVERSON: When Harold Mintz said he was giving a kidney to a person he didn’t know, some thought it was more a selfish act than an act of altruism.

(To Mr. Mintz): When your friends and acquaintances found out what you were doing, did some of them think you were either crazy, a, or b, irresponsible?

Mr. MINTZ: All the above. I had friends who think it’s wonderful. I’ve had friends who were angry at me for making the decision to do that, who said, “You shouldn’t do that. How can you do that to your family?”

SEVERSON: But the family, including their daughter Hayley, gave him their blessing.

HAYLEY MINTZ: My dad has only one kidney. My mom has two.

SEVERSON: Sometimes altruism is not the act of one individual, but of many. Consider the farming village of Le Chambon in southern France during World War II. Over a four-year period, 5,000 Protestant Christians sheltered about the same number of Jews from the Nazis and almost certain death. Hilde and Jean Hillebrand could never forget, nor completely understand, the selfless generosity of the people of Le Chambon.

HILDE HILLEBRAND (From Documentary, WEAPONS OF THE SPIRIT) (Speaking in French): They really did something. They risked their lives.

JEAN HILLEBRAND (From Documentary, WEAPONS OF THE SPIRIT) (Speaking in French): They hid us in their farms. They knew the police were near.

Ms. HILLEBRAND: They said we were cousins, relatives.

Mr. HILLEBRAND: They put themselves in danger, taking every risk.

SEVERSON: This was altruism on a grand scale, and Professor Monroe says it happened in part because the people of Le Chambon identified with the persecuted Jews.

Dr. MONROE: The Chambons were Protestant Huguenots. They had been persecuted. They had a memory of that. And one of the theories that people talk about is that you understand what it’s like to be in another person’s place. You have a kind of empathic involvement with another human being that makes you feel what it is like to be them.

SEVERSON: Le Chambon’s spiritual leader was Pastor André Trocmé, a pacifist whose resistance stemmed from biblical teachings. In this documentary, WEAPONS OF THE SPIRIT, Pastor Trocmé’s daughter reads from a sermon he gave to the congregation.

PASTOR TROCMÉ’S DAUGHTER (Reading from Sermon): The duty of Christians is to resist whenever our adversaries will demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the gospel. We will do so without fear, but also without pride and without hate.

Dr. MONROE: These were people who felt they were a certain kind of human being, and Madame Trocmé said, “These decisions are about you. They’re not about other people. If you believe — do you believe that the Jews are your brothers? If so, then you have to act on that.” And that’s what I was told over and over by rescuers.

SEVERSON (To Prof. Monroe): This was the whole village?

Dr. MONROE: The whole village. The whole village. It was very much a kind of contagion of goodness.

SEVERSON: Out of the ashes of 9/11, there was another contagion of goodness.

COURTNEY COWART: The immediate response when people from all over the world just left their normal lives, got in cars, got on planes, and came to New York to say, “How can I help?”

SEVERSON: Courtney Cowart was working in one of the offices of Trinity Church, just a few blocks from the [World] Trade [Center] towers. She describes herself as one of those gray ghosts coming up Fifth Avenue.

Ms. COWART: I remember my brain racing, trying to calculate, “How do I protect myself?” And then realizing there’s nothing — there’s nothing you can do. It’s a moment that’s almost impossible to put into words, but it was a feeling of, “Take me.”

SEVERSON (To Ms. Cowart): A transforming moment?

Ms. COWART: (Nods Her Head Yes).

SEVERSON: She became one of the leaders of the St. Paul Ministry, of what she calls “a community of love” — thousands of volunteers of every race, political persuasion, religion or no religion, who rose above the rubble to personify the basic goodness of humanity.

Ms. COWART: One of my favorite conversations was with a crane operator named Joe Bradley. He was absolutely devastated, sitting on the curb with his head in his hands, and he talks about this teenager from the Salvation Army with pink hair and her belly button showing coming in the middle of the night and giving him cold water and literally washing his feet. And, you know, he said, “I never identified with those kind of people before. But that night she became my hero.”

UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER: The outpouring of love and support was so — was something I thought I would never experience. I saw humility and compassion in its truest form.

Ms. COWART: The way we were — people were running in to sacrifice themselves for others. It was like a huge revelation of how precious we are to each other, even total strangers. To me that is where God was in this.

SEVERSON: If you do an altruistic act, do you feel good?

Dr. MONROE: I think usually people do, but not always. A lot of times people thought that it was just a kind of normal thing to do.

SEVERSON: For Harold Mintz, giving the kidney has given him a cause — to persuade kids about to get their driver’s license to sign the back saying they want to be an organ donor.

Mr. MINTZ: If everybody signed their driver’s license right now, nobody would die waiting for a kidney, plain and simple. If you hear about a good deed, it kind of reminds you, “Oh yeah, I guess I can do that. I don’t have to turn my back or have to, you know, do something.” I don’t look at myself as an altruist or whatever the title you want to put on it. I look at it as having taken advantage of an opportunity that was in front of me at the time.

SEVERSON: But most important, his kidney saved a life of Gennett Belay, a young mother of two who had been waiting and praying for a new kidney for 11 years.

Ms. MINTZ: She had, like, 40 operations. She had had different bouts of different kinds of cancers.

SEVERSON: And now two families have become one extended family.

Mr. MINTZ: What’s not fair to say is I didn’t benefit. I benefit immensely from it. My head feels much better. My heart feels much better because what I did worked.

UNIDENTIFIED MINISTER (Trinity Church): I commission you, Courtney Cowart, as relief development coordinator to New Orleans.

SEVERSON: For Courtney Cowart, the transformation continues. Because of her good works for the survivors during the dramatic year following 9/11, she’s been sent to direct the disaster response for the Episcopal Diocese of New Orleans.

Ms. COWART: It was the most extraordinary year of my life. I have hugely positive memories. And it’s part of why I am so extraordinarily excited about the opportunity of going to Louisiana, because I know what’s in store.

Altruism is the phenomenon of generosity to others with no expectation of reward. For many, giving is a religious requirement; others just do good whether they are religious or not./wnet/religionandethics/files/2006/03/altruism-thumb.jpg